


In Words, Like Weeds

by You_Light_The_Sky



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Magical Realism, Soulmates, Writing feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 12:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/You_Light_The_Sky/pseuds/You_Light_The_Sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John decides to name the man (the character, the person in his head) Sherlock.</p><p>Chinese and Russian Translation Available</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Words, Like Weeds

**Author's Note:**

> Just a ficlet to process my sad thoughts and more. I wrote it in the passing and hope you enjoy it as you wait for Darkling : )
> 
> The title is a line from "In Memoriam A.H.H." by Lord Alfred Tennyson, Poem V.
> 
> Chinese Translation [ here](http://221dnet.211.30i.cn/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=4003) by fay2205
> 
> Russian Translation [ here ](https://ficbook.net/readfic/4330105) by Little_Unicorn

The man in the photograph stares back at him, his dark eyes in the overlapping silhouettes of greys and whites, so very intense and knowing (even if this man lived centuries ago, during the era when science was first beginning to make its modern craft, when discoveries were made about the Origin of Species and the nature of humanity was being questioned--) He's just a random person, caught in some of an old photographer's attempts at using a camera, in some scenes meant to capture London during those times. He's just a person in the background.

(But he's not.)

John can't stop staring, eyes drawn to the man's high cheekbones and pale reflection and the funny deerstalker hat that hides his dark curls. It's an odd sensation, as if he's the moth being drawn to a bright flame and he can't look away because there's a story there. John can feel it in his bones, tingling upwards and pulling at his fingers and his heart to write and to pour out his soul onto a page.

So John does.

(He can't ignore the sensation, the pulses or the urges. He just has to get the idea down before he floats away, intangible and lost as half-lived bubbles in the air or else he feels a pain in his heart and bleeding well up in his mouth and that is... well, that is not good.)

His ever present little notebook, with spirals down the side and rumpled sheets that are stained yellow and grey from so much moving around (in Afghanistan and now when he has returned to London, feeling as dreary as the city looks in the rain, wandering without any purpose or inspiration... until now.)

The pages flip open and he has his pen (it's always by his side and his gun.) Then ink is flowing out in smooth scrawls, a mixture of cursive writing and print with some short hand that he picked up in Uni (and from his travels in the war.) Some of it crosses in between the lines on the page but John is beyond caring, stuck in the zone between here and there, a dreamy high where his words are never enough (never) to capture the exact feelings or images in his head (such bloody and dark images) but they are all he has. "A numbing pain" as Tennyson would put it, in John's favourite poem by him 'In Memoriam A.H.H.'

He paints a picture (the best that he can, as a carpenter being ordered to carve the perfect chair with no wood, only air) of a brilliant man (because the man in the photograph must be brilliant) who solves crimes. That's who this mysterious, entirely random man must be. He's a consulting detective in the Victorian Era. Grumpy. Eccentric. Moody. Difficult. And yet, a good man.

John can feel the man's sore disposition accompanied by the desire to bring criminals to justice. And the need for the work, a hunger like John hungers for words, for the perfect puzzle and the stop to boredom (only for John, it's a stop to the endless thoughts that question his existence. In short, the need to feel alive.)

The man has enemies (who wouldn't, a man so brilliant and with such an acidic attitude to those he can't connect with?) Someone just as cunning and with as dazzling a mind but a mirror reflection, an opposite. John sees an image in his mind of a normal looking bloke in a suit but with eyes as dark and as intense as the man in the photograph, only with a tinge of sadistic happiness and a deep loneliness that only the man in the photograph could understand.

"Moriarty," John whispers, breathing the name onto the page just as a name for the man in the photograph appears in his mind, like a beacon, lighting up the darkness of his thoughts.

"Sherlock," he spills the name over on the last two lines of the page, memorizing the way the name rolls off his tongue and how the 's' and the 'l' loops around in his inky script.

It's perfect.

-

When Ella asks him how he's coping from his traumatic visit in Afghanistan (writing a war novel in between fighting one, getting shot and then wishing desperately to live if only to write one good thing, just one, God, please, I _need to write like I need air_ and I don't know why but I know that I need this--)

He wakes up with a tremor in his other hand and legs that will never walk again but he has his mind and he has his words and there is the impulse, the urge to write or else he'll bleed—

"I'm fine," says John and he almost believes it. "I'm writing my novel, finally."

"Oh," Ella perks up, for this is a new development, "What is it about?"

"Sherlock," he replies before he can help it, because that name is one that needs to be said.

Ella looks confused, "I'm sorry, but who or what is Sherlock?"

He doesn't answer right away, strangely possessive of what he hasn't finished writing yet.

"You'll see," he tells her.

-

At night, he pours over his notebook until the pages run out and he needs to grab the stack of empty journals that he bought from the book shop with what meagre savings he has left (all for rent in a shoddy flat because he can’t bear to face his sister and her drinking again, can’t bear to hear her insult his silly dreams of stories and his simple desire to have been read by at least _one_ person...) He lets his fingers move and weave sentences together. Some of them don’t make sense when he takes a breather and looks back on them (or at least, he doesn’t think they make sense until he rereads them again, in the morning and wonders how such aching and clever words ever came from his hands.)

There are black stains on the edges of his fingers and his palms. Some of the words stick to John’s cheek when he wakes and finds that a page is stubbornly clinging to his face like a desperate lover’s kiss. The words are faded against his skin and remind him of the dry blood that sometimes clings to the edges of his lips when he doesn’t reach for his notebook in time, when the words are so adamant to get to a page that they slice open his veins until he writes.

Sherlock goes out into the world, picking and choosing cases in his beloved London. At first he is alone, a sole force in the world always isolated from others but then John needs someone to see Sherlock through awed eyes, someone who doesn’t have all the pieces to narrate and John comes up with Molly Hooper, a female mortician disguised as a male. He quite likes Molly (or Ms. Hooper, as Sherlock addresses her) and shares her adoration and awe of Sherlock Holmes, as she accompanies him on his cases.

But something is missing. Sherlock is distant to Molly in her narrative but ever present in John’s muses and thoughts. It’s like Sherlock is living in his head and whispering, ‘ _Yes, my dear Watson, that’s how I did it, this is how you deduce_ ’ while John whispers, ‘ _Amazing!_ ’ in reply.

On the page, Sherlock seems an enigmatic figure, so very mysterious and distant from Molly’s affections (but never her friendship) while in John’s mind he hears the voice of Sherlock Holmes more and more as if the man has stepped out of his photograph and is leaning against John’s ear, the soft lilt of his words caressing John’s hair. He is always there like a shadow, telling John of more adventures with Molly until John can’t go out of his flat without having the urge to write again, without having to roll his wheelchair to the nearest restaurant and order something (anything) so that he has the excuse of rolling his chair to their tables to start writing.

Bags begin to form under his eyes. His fingers are callused and stiff and sore. He thinks that some of the words may become permanently stained to his cheeks with the way he keeps falling asleep on the journals and notebooks, curled up around them for nonexistent warmth.

“John, whatever if bothering you right now,” Ella tells him when he sees her ( _hire a new therapist,_ Sherlock whispers, _I never liked these pseudo-sciences_ and John has to bite his tongue not to retort that psychology is a very applicable and respected branch of knowledge in the twenty-first century, thank you), “it’s not healthy.”

No, it’s not.

But he is addicted to the high and the endorphins and the adrenaline pumping through his blood when he gets the urge and his pen is flowing with ink. He can’t stop it. It’s the only thing that matters, the only thing that keeps him going—

 _The game is afoot, Watson, come!_ Sherlock tells him in his ear.

And John has no choice but to follow.

-

Sherlock seems... well, he seems lonely sometimes, when he thinks that Molly isn’t looking. But she always looks, because John knows that Molly is just as in love with Sherlock as John is, even if she has moved on and is beginning to notice the Inspector Lestrade in a better light. Part of her will always love him, as you often do for your first loves.

-

 _And what was your first love, if you believe in such things, my dear writer?_ he pictures Sherlock scoffing, the syllables brushing against John’s cheek in slight butterfly kisses.

 _Isn’t it obvious?_ John asks. _The work._

And then he pictures Sherlock’s eyes—Are they blue or green? Perhaps grey or as black as the photograph suggests?—have an odd light to them. _Yes, of course. How clever of you, Watson. The work!_

-

Molly speaks to John too, at times. After all, he does write from her narrative, her thoughts are translated onto the page even if Sherlock’s are not (and only interpreted by Molly’s eyes.) She asks him to make up a friend for Sherlock, someone that will understand him like John does, someone who makes him laugh instead of smile faintly.

-

 _But you’re his friend,_ John protests.

 _Yes,_ Molly agrees, even if she doesn’t feel like it all the time. This Sherlock does tell her how much he values her expertise despite her gender and she adores him all the more for it. _But I still think he needs someone and he doesn’t find it unless he’s talking with you. But in the stories, oh, in the stories, I think he is still so very much alone! I just wish he could find someone to talk to, someone who understands even more than I do, because at times, I am not enough._

... _Oh, Molly, you are enough, you matter so much!_ John thinks.

 _But not in the way that he needs,_ she replies wisely, recalling the moments in the cases where Sherlock has a gleeful expression on his face but no one shares his excitement. Where he looks up, for a person that is not his brave Hooper, someone who understands his joke about the criminals. The cases where Sherlock is so far gone in his cases that he forgets all else but the work and talking to John. The cases where he seems to reach out for someone but touches nothing but air. He smiles politely at Molly always and has a certain care for her. But it is not what he looks for.

John has nothing to say to that.

-

He makes up the Woman after that, the only one able to match Sherlock Holmes and beat him, Irene Adler.

Immediately, Sherlock seems enamoured (at least from Molly’s perspective and John even believes it with Sherlock’s whisperings containing nothing but thoughts and attempts to dissect the Woman’s motivations and plans.) The detective is obsessed with clues to solving her flawless thefts and blackmailing system.

_Flawless work, Watson! How does she manage to thwart me every time? It’s insufferable and it’s fascinating, I need to beat her!_

And John smiles because he’s glad that Sherlock’s entertained by someone other than Moriarty (for that spider whispers almost as often as Sherlock, with disturbing plans and taunts; a degree of callousness that John doesn’t hear in Sherlock’s voice.)

 _I believe in you,_ John says and he thinks he hears a hitch of breath, a touch against his shoulder (but that isn’t possible) before a reply comes.

_Thank you._

Sherlock races across London with Molly, finally succeeding in capturing Irene (who laughs at the exciting thrill of it all) only for her to escape again and again. The Woman adds a spice of colour to the story, makes Sherlock’s demeanour light up with interest in the puzzle and clues.

But she does not make Sherlock smile and relax in that way that Molly wishes for him.

 _He’s not happy,_ Molly tells John, _not truly happy at least. He’s as enamoured with the work as you are with yours but there is something missing and as wonderfully clever as Ms. Adler is, I do not believe that she is the answer to Holmes’ happiness._

 _How so?_ John asks sadly.

 _We are all at a distance from him, even if he considers any of us friends. I do not believe that he is content in this world at all,_ Molly says.

 _I don’t understand,_ he tells her and he wishes that he did. He’s the author, isn’t he? Shouldn’t he know the souls beneath his characters, know them intimately from inside out? How is it that even the characters that come inspired from a photograph can hide their secrets from you?

Molly doesn’t answer him.

-

 _Sherlock?_ John asks on the nights when the words don’t come (those nights that are so rare now) and he just sits in his wheelchair and stares up at the ceiling, wondering when sleep will come and what crimson lines he’ll spell out in his nightmares then. When he can pretend that he’s not concerned with his sanity, the voices in his head and how he talks back.

 _Yes, Watson?_ The answer comes not half a moment later, because the detective will always respond to him even if the others don’t.

 _Are you happy?_ he asks then before he wants to berate himself. How lonely he must be, to ask if his imaginary friends are content!

(But where do our creations, our stories, our imaginary friends go, after we stop thinking about them? Do they cease or do the live? John doesn’t know but, God, he hopes they live on and they never cease. He hopes that the gift the urges him to write is just _that_ , an urge and not the creation of a parallel universe that will crumble into dust the moment he writes the last page. If that’s the case, then he never wants to stop. He’ll write and write until only bones remain, stubbornly wrapped around his pen.)

 _Of course, I am!_ Sherlock replies immediately, _I am never bored, not when I have you creating my stories. How can I not be happy?_

Somehow, disappointment seeps into him.

_What? I see your twitch there, Watson, I know you’re upset. What have I done?_

He considers denying it, but with Sherlock as his conscious thoughts, that is impossible.

_Sherlock, happiness isn’t always equated with not being bored. It’s more than that._

There is an annoyed huff and John feels guilty. He knows that Sherlock Holmes is capable of feeling happiness and caring. It’s just that sometimes the detective forgets that happiness isn’t always equated with the absence of boredom. He’s afraid that Sherlock may just be existing on the high of his work, as John is with his writing (with Sherlock) and he just...

He wants Sherlock to be happy. He wants to be sure.

 _I have you, don’t I?_ Sherlock says.

And somehow, even if his logic protests that no one has each other, Sherlock and John are imaginary and real, barriers that can’t touch... it feels like the right answer.

John falls asleep to the sound of Sherlock listing off his index of recorded poisons and antidotes.

-

Sometimes it’s not enough—these words, these stories—and when the urge comes John wants to bite off his tongue just to taunt it, to say, _see? I can’t fucking put words together. My sentences are shit, nothing I create is worth anything and I’m nothing!_ He’s just a broken man who had a dream, a man who was shot and lived and can’t walk anymore. He’s not a writer, he’s not a storyteller, he’s not worth anything but then—

The words beckon, a drug whose scent he knows so well, Sherlock whispers excitedly about his new case (another serial killer or a drug den) and John’s hand is holding the pen again to make the voices go away.

(They never do.

And he doesn’t want them to.)

-

Why does this happen to him? Why does he bleed if he doesn’t write out the words that come at the insistence of the urge? _Whywhywhywhy—_

“Deduce,” Sherlock would say.

John just accepts it as a fact of his life, post-Afghanistan. He wonders if he’s hallucinating this (the blood, the urge, the stories) and if this is a part of his diagnosed PTSD. But then Sherlock’s voices and the others speak again and John doesn’t ask.

He just writes.

-

It happens like this:

Molly’s narrative is rushing across the final pages of the thirtieth notebook that’s he’s filled up with fat and delectable words in a fast pace. John can barely keep up, caught up in the excitement of a face-to-face confrontation with Moriarty (who laughs constantly during Molly’s retelling.) There is a shot, more fighting. Molly gets to face off against one of Moriarty’s henchmen, a sniper named Moran, and she is winning but to the side—

Sherlock and Moriarty are circling each other, taunting each other. Their breathless and complex dialogue spills over, like shoots of code going back and forth at incomprehensible speeds. They are distorted images of each other in a mirror, biting back and trying to break through the glass, to hurt, to touch, to join and to destroy—

Then, Moriarty raises a pistol towards Molly, tries to shoot her. Sherlock pushes Moriarty to the ground and the two of them are wrestling, their thoughts and voices speaking in inhuman speeds that overlap and overload John’s head with no, no, no, no, because he knows how this will end now, hears and sees it clearer than the words blurring in front of him.

 _This is where I die,_ says Sherlock and John can see it now, an image of two men, two opposites struggling and then falling over the cliffs, over the waterfalls to icy depths below.

Then it’s over. No more Sherlock. No more stories and John will write it because—

“No!” John rips his hand away from the pen, as if burned. “I can’t, I won’t, no—”

But the urge is there, the urge to write even if his hand cramps and red welts form on his fingers, even if he feels ill in the morning. There is a burning in his mouth, in his heart. He feels the cuts beginning to form, carving deeper and deeper into flesh the longer that he resists. But John can’t do it. He doesn’t want it. And so the cuts stab at him, he thinks, numbly, that blood must be pooling in the bottom of his lungs from his heart.

Blood dribbles out of his lips and John doesn’t fight it (not if Sherlock dies, never mind that he’s not real, John can’t lose this—)

 _Watson, don’t be a fool! You must finish the story!_ Sherlock is shouting so loudly that John almost believes that the detective is next to him, fancies that he sees his figure there, pressing cloth against the crimson and grabbing John’s barely used mobile. _We don’t exist, if you don’t finish this, we don’t have a future!_

John doesn’t move.

_Please, Watson, please don’t be dead. I have to meet you. **I have to meet you!**_

Everything has an ending, John knows this. He just chooses not to write Sherlock’s but, rather, his own instead.

-

Later, they will tell him that there was a mysterious call to the ambulance and that they found him sitting in his wheelchair, covered in ribbons and sheets of red, with the final pages of his notebook were filled with words written in blood.

The story finished.

-

When he awakes, he is in a white room, buried under mountains of white blankets and he thinks that he must be dead because the man in the photograph is sitting by his bedside, a scowl on his lips. He’s a quite a vision, John notes dumbly under the haze of medical drugs, rather striking in his black coat and blue scarf. Even in the twenty-first century, Sherlock Holmes has to stand out.

“You should have finished the story. You should have waited,” the man spits out when he notices that John is awake.

John blinks slowly at him, unable to believe, to hope—

“It’s strange. I got a text from a number that doesn’t exist, citing lines from half-forgotten conversations that I only remember in dreams. Said something about a murder and so I went to investigate around the time that the ambulance arrived to save you. I saw the books on your desk and when I touched them... I remembered an extraordinary life from decades ago, another world ago... a life you helped create and bring to life here,” says Sherlock slowly.

The silence is yet another gulf and tension that John will never be able to recreate with his words.

“...I... I don’t...”

 _This isn’t possible,_ he thinks.

“But it is,” Sherlock answers, as if he read John’s mind. “I remember a life before being a detective in that world, where I nearly gave up hope on my studies and turned to a less... savory way of life. But a starving writer saved me from a few thugs that tried to kill me, before he was stabbed himself.”

John finds himself nodding, unable to understand why this story is relevant (and yet, it feels so familiar, as all stories do. This one, more so.)

“I held him then and I felt that I knew him like I knew no one else. I wanted...” the detective’s fingers curls up in fists, “I wanted more time. But do you know, my dear Watson, what he told me?”

He feels his throat dry and shakes his head.

“That we’d meet again, in another life and that I should try to do my best without him for this one,” his detective recites. “And what, to my surprise, happened next? When I thought that I’d succumb to deeper depths of negativity worse than before, I began to hear _you,_ John, _your thoughts_ , as you brought my stories to life.”

Now he feels like he can’t, he can’t—

“I don’t understand,” he croaks out.

Sherlock’s face shows no sign of expression but his gaze is warming (grey-blue) as he leans down to ghost his words into John’s lips. “I waited for you to finish the story,” he sighs as his fingers come up to trace letters, such elegant and beautiful letters, against John’s cheek (the same ones that he sees smudged against his face when he wakes, the ones he can’t decipher.)

“...I... I didn’t want it to end...” he tries to say.

But Sherlock silences him with one movement, a hushed, ‘ _My dear writer_ ’ and warmth stealing all words, all sensation from his lips.

-

It doesn’t make sense, any of it, the magic, the urges, the connections and the multiple lives. And yet it does. It doesn’t have to, but somehow, it does.

The story finished.

(And another begins.)


End file.
